Features Africa Scene: The Protector by Tony Park

Africa Scene: The Protector by Tony Park

Tony Park, an Australian, is the author of over 20 bestselling thrillers set in Africa. A “once-in-a-lifetime” safari holiday to Africa in 1995 turned out to be the inspiration he needed to quit his job in public relations and become a full-time writer. Now, Tony and his wife, Nicola, split their time between Sydney and South Africa.

The Times of London called Tony Wilbur Smith’s spiritual heir. His books look at the often-bloody fight to save endangered wildlife, and also draw on Tony’s 34 years of experience in the Australian Army Reserve, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

The backstory of THE PROTECTOR is the multi-million dollar poaching and smuggling of pangolins – scaly anteaters – for their bush meat and scales. As usual, with huge money involved, the smugglers will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.

What brought you to the pangolin trade as the theme for this thriller?

I’d been aware of the plight of pangolins for many years, and in the back of my mind was a thought that I should write about them. The illegal trade in pangolins dwarfs all other forms of poaching and trafficking – possibly up to one million pangolins were killed and removed from Africa in 2019 along.

They’re predominantly killed for their scales, which are ground up and used in traditional medicines in parts of Asia. Ironically, given the size of the trade, they are one of the hardest animals to spot on safari. They’re small and secretive, and the people who care for them and protect them also shun the limelight. I tried a couple of times to make contact with people in the pangolin conservation world, but was told, politely, they did not want attention or visitors to their facilities (partly because of security fears – these little things are worth a fortune in the wrong hands!).

I’d just about given up when I met a young woman at one of my book launches who told me I should write a book about pangolins. I told her I’d tried, but couldn’t get a foot in the door – she then told me she was a graduate student researching pangolins and she could get me access to her professor. I finally had an ‘in’!

Doc is an amazing character, a respected professor at a South African university, she not only studies pangolins, but puts her life on the line to try to save them and get poachers arrested. What was the inspiration for her?

Tony Park at Antares Camp

Doc is very much based on the professor that I was introduced to. Professor Ray Jansen is probably South Africa’s leading expert on pangolins and was the founder and former chair of the African Pangolin Working group. As well as being a respected academic, until recently he also headed an undercover task team made up of police, and other law enforcement and environmental agencies, whose mission was to bust pangolin smuggling rings. Ray would go undercover as a buyer and then he and his team would spring their trap and arrest the poachers. They saved hundreds of pangolins. Ray spoke to me honestly and openly about this dangerous job and the toll it took on him. Doc’s story is, to a large part, his story.

The novel marries the thriller genre with a mystery, the key is to discover who is behind the murders that seem to follow Doc. Did you decide to focus more on a whodunit type of thriller this time, or did the story just develop that way?

As I don’t plot my books the story just evolved organically – more into a mystery. I could not, for the life of me, work out who was going to be the ‘baddie’ in this book, right up until the end. I actually love it when that happens (though it can be frustrating when you’re on deadline and still don’t know whodunnit!).

Ian Laidlaw is an Australian with a PR background on a holiday in South Africa. At first, he’s not sure he will even enjoy it, but he falls for the wildlife and the country very hard. He is completely out of his home environment, but he knows how to handle himself when the chips are down. He even toys with writing a thriller set in Africa with a strong romance theme. Is there some of Tony Park in Ian?

No comment! It’s been 20 years since my first book, Far Horizon, was published and nearly 30 years since my first safari to Africa. I was thinking about that first visit, and how and why I fell so hard for ‘Africa’. I wanted to try and recapture that wonderment, and having an Australian visiting Africa for the first time in THE PROTECTOR just started to bring back all those memories. It was fun, remembering.

Studying pangolins as Doc does in the book

You’ve told us before that you don’t plot your books. Jeffrey Deaver says he plots his thrillers in great detail because otherwise he can’t work out how to move on from a sticky situation for his protagonist without backtracking. THE PROTECTOR has many twists. Did you plan some of them in advance?

As well as not plotting, I NEVER backtrack. I never read anything I wrote the day or week before and don’t stop writing until I get to the end of the first draft of the whole book. I just accept that there will be dead ends and plot twists that don’t go anywhere, and, yes, sticky situations. To me that’s all part of the fun. If I’ve headed in a certain direction and the story doesn’t go where I wanted to, I just change tack and start off on a new heading. I love it when readers subsequently say that I ‘cleverly’ misdirected them. I have to laugh, because that was just me having no idea where the story was going. None of the twists in THE PROTECTOR were planned!

Much of the action takes place at the Antares Bush Camp in a private game reserve near the Kruger National Park, in Kruger itself, and then along the Zambezi. Your knowledge and love of the area comes through as a strong and detailed feeling for place in this book. Is this your favorite part of South Africa?

Prof Ray Jansen with pangolin

I have a few favorite places in Africa, but it’s fair to say that the Greater Kruger Park and the Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe are probably equal contenders for number one. I write and set my books ‘on location’, wherever I happened to be, and that’s where I was when writing THE PROTECTOR. As far as possible, I use real places, like Antares Camp, so that people can maybe visit for themselves, or relate to places they’ve been.

What’s next on your thriller agenda?

I’m just finishing the copy edits for my 23rd African thriller novel. My publishers will probably kill me, but, shush … here’s an ITW ‘scoop’. It’s going to be called ‘Die by the Sword’ and is a dual-time-period thriller set in the present, and in the aftermath of the Anglo-Zulu War in 1880 South Africa. It will be released worldwide on July 31, 2025.

Sounds terrific!

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